After 22 wonderful years in Ripon, Wisconsin, I am happy to report a successful move to the Berkshires with my husband and two spaniels. Co-editor with David Graham of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf), my recent publications in addition to V-V include SoFloPoJo, Villanelles (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets), and Cooking With The Muse (Tupelo). I have work forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review and The Crafty Poet 11 (Terrapin Books). Pantoums are in my DNA, and I am grateful to FF for accepting so many of them.

Holding us close to the frozen green horizonfractal hexagons of ice raised to the powerof infinity remedy our low-grade cabinfever as we follow the Red Trail, an hour till sunset to navigate one woodland circuit’sobstacle course. Silver-haired couple aloftsolo through time and space, this thicket’sall arctic slide and snowfall footing, softthwack of branches, heavy-hearted moleculesof sand crystals submerged. Each cruel mid-March prediction for Door County’s peninsula ridicules April showers. May flowers bring farfetchedequations even in June. Hoping instead for luckier sums we subtract ourselves to bed.

*

For luckier sums we subtract ourselves to bednumb, the only guests in this Bates-like motelall weekend, off-season tourists, blues shed,fish-fry voices pitched to the frequency of whalesong, a Friday night duet of blubbery homebodieswho resume midlife comfort zones, warm additions of arms, wild divisions of legs, geometry’stransverse of elbows and knees, lovely traditionsat multiple angles of contact. Still married we carry the tune of the ice machine next doorhome with us, for good measure feed the orchid four more cubes, wake to the first of fourblooms on the sill, news of an airliner down over Malaysian waters, its trajectory unknown.

*

Over Malaysian waters a jet’s trajectory unknown,shockwaves go viral, spread worldwide griefwith each cold click of the key or remote, moan of family members on camera, diminished beliefin miracles. At impossible depths a black boxsinks, sends sonar pings of receding certaintyfrom one salty sea into another. No mission unlocksany opaque technology, no country claims mysterysolved. Search planes, divers, remains, wreckage, conspiracy theories throw off course our daily screen-time and vocabulary. Under the radar no breakagebig enough floats to the surface, no tide meanenough washes bodies ashore. On display, the ocean cracks and ripples blue-gray.

​(First sonnet published in Soundings: Door County in Poetry, Caravaggio Press 2015)

Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF